The Front Cover (25k JPEG)
Ocean Circulation and Atmospheric Surface Forcing FieldsA team led by Carl Wunsch and John Marshall at MIT is conducting simulations to forecast the "weather" of the Earth's oceans. Top: Monthly mean fields of the net sea surface heat flux and the surface wind stress as provided by the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) re-analysis for January 1993. Bottom: The circulation of the Pacific Ocean at 63-meter depth (blue vector field) for 1993 by combining an ocean circulation model with one year of absolute TOPEX/POSEIDON sea surface height data. This also shows the sea surface height field associated with the interior ocean flow field.